Chapter 5712: A Clash of Dreams! I
Chapter 5712: A Clash of Dreams! I
Noah traversed in silence for a while as he continued to think of many things, and after a few minutes, he finally came across a Gu Lifeform in this region of predominant weavings of Dreams.
The Common Dream Gu was the type that did not even run.
It hung in a pocket of still silk where three strands had tangled into a kind of nest, moon-small at this range, its translucent body heaving slow, dream-weather drifting golden through its interior. Its many eyes were half-lidded. It was not fleeing and it was not feeding. It was simply there, doing the one thing its whole existence was made to do, and Noah stood in the drift a short distance off and looked at it with eyes in which Sonder had not once dimmed since it woke.
He saw its dream.
A single cloud of gold turned around the creature, slow, and inside the cloud was the dream, and Noah looked into it and found it so... simple.
It dreamed of warmth. It dreamed of the silk being soft. It dreamed, in the wordless way of a thing that had never held a word, of drifting somewhere the strands fell thick and the dream-weather was sweet, and being left alone to drift there. That was it!
That was the entire interior life of a lifeform that read past a hundred in every attribute a panel could measure. It wanted to be warm. It wanted to be left alone.
Noah found, standing there, that he did not want to break it. But...he would anyway. He needed a Common Gu, and this was one, and he had crossed out of the weavings of time and let himself be eaten to reach a place where he could take it.
In the end, Existence still held natural selection as one still had to do what they had to do.
It was like a human empathizing with the chicken he raised in a chicken coop. He could do it, but when he was eating that chicken soup...that soup tasted damn good.
He raised his hand, and THE Provenance of THE Human Dreamer gathered behind his eyes, ready to reach into the little creature’s dream and fold it gently shut and carry it with him!
But then, his Provenance buzzed as he felt something.
"That one is ours."
The voice came down through the silk.
Noah did not turn at once. He let his hand lower, and he let the reverie in his eyes hold, and only then did he look.
They came out of the deep nebulas in a wedge.
Nine riders, titanic, each the height of a small mountain, carved of bronze and stone. Their Steeds burned, whole and blazing, First Causes pouring light through the hide of a white stag whose antlers held Observable Existences in their tines, a golden six-legged serpent, a plated beast whose every plate was a continent, a plain horse that was somehow worse than all the rest!
And dragged behind them on obsidian rope that burned with an Immense One’s borrowed power came three bound Dream Gu, their tentacles limp, their Dreams gone dark.
At the head, on the white stag, sat the largest of them. Crimson eyes in a face of old bronze. She looked down at Noah, and she looked at the little untaken Gu drifting in its nest, and her mouth curved.
"You have good eyes," she said. "You found a Dream Gu, but we will take it off your hands."
Noah looked up at her, and then he looked at all of them, one after another.
Golden clouds of dreams gathered around each of them.
He read three of their dreams while she waited.
The leader dreamed of a nod. Not from anyone. From an Immense One. A single acknowledgment from a Father who had bred her line for exactly this and had never once looked directly at any of them, and she did what she was told so that ultimately she hoped she would finally earn her the tilt of a head she had wanted.
The Descendant on the golden serpent dreamed smaller and uglier: of the leader failing, so that he might be first to bring the catches home.
The one on the plain horse did not dream of the Father at all. It dreamed of the day the hunts would end. It did not believe the day would come. It dreamed of it anyway, quietly, and had for a very long time.
Noah took all of that in!
"You have a great many of those already," Noah said. He nodded at the three bound Gu without heat. "Three on the rope, and there are more out there in the silk than the one drifting between us. This region of the chrysalis is full of dreams. Go find another."
His voice was calm.
"I do not want a conflict with the First Borns of a Father I have no quarrel with...well, for the most part. I have had a long day. Someone I hold dear watched her home burn not long ago, and I would rather not add much more today. So take the good advice a stranger is giving you for free. Find another Gu. Leave this one, and leave me, and we both go home with what we came for."
For a moment the silk held its silence.
Then the leader laughed!
It was the laugh of a titan being lectured by a candle.
"You speak very well for a thing with no aura at all," she said. "I have been looking at you since we arrived, little one, and there is nothing under your skin. No Cause. No standing that reaches me. You dress like something and weigh like nothing. Who do you even descend from? No matter."
She leaned forward over the stag’s blazing neck. "That Gu is ours because we say it is ours, and there is no one here to say otherwise but you, and you are no one. Step back into your silk. Father enjoys his dreams, and we have some more to catch before we can go."
She did not step back. None of them stepped back!
The nine titans and their burning Steeds stayed, and the little Dream Gu drifted on in its nest between the two of them, warm, wanting to be left alone.
Noah looked at their panels while she spoke,.
|FIRST BORN OF THE SLEEPLESS FIEND (×9)|
|Attribute range across the party: 101 to 130.|
|Depth: THE SEAM. Every rider a Cause-bearing Descendant of undying line.|
|PROVENANCE: 0. None among them holds a single point.|
Every one of them read higher than he did.
Several of them, in raw magnitude, could break him. And not one of them held a single point of Provenance, because they were spoken things, sentences with a bloodline, and a sentence does not generate its own aim.
They had been given everything they were. They had made none of it!
He, standing there weighing nothing, had made all of himself.
And every one of them held a dream that wanted to end his, so that a hunt could be completed and a head might tilt.
Noah felt the old thing rise in him, the tyranny, the greed, the cold amusement at the mighty taking themselves so seriously, and he did not fight it down. Sonder had not replaced it. Sonder had only aimed it.
These were not bystanders drifting through their own quiet lives. These were nine dreams that had looked at his dream and decided to grind it under, and against that, protecting what was his had never once required an apology.
Even if they were the Protagonists of their own story...he was THE Meta-Fictional Protagonist!
He wanted to see. He wanted to see his one dream, the dream of a human who had decided to be grand without leaving only ruin behind him, clash against nine older dreams that were certain of themselves, and he wanted to find out whose held!
It would be arduous. Nine titans who each outweighed him, their Steeds burning, an Immense One’s rope in their hands. He might bleed for it. He intended to persevere and come out standing anyway!
Noah let his hand rise once more, and this time THE Provenance of THE Human Dreamer did not gather gently. It surged, blue and gold and vast, and the light of dreams in his eyes blazed until the nine riders and their burning mounts threw shadows across the falling silk.
"Here is where we are," Noah said. "I gave you the door. You looked at it, and you decided I was no one, and you kept your feet where they are. That was your choice, and I am a great believer in letting existences make their own choices, even the wrong ones."
The little Dream Gu, sensing at last that its warm nest had become the center of something, stirred, and began, slowly, to wake.
"You came here to catch dreams for a Father who does not look at you." Noah’s blue-gold gaze swept the wedge, and stopped on the leader, on the crimson eyes and the dream of a nod behind them.
"Let me show you what it looks like when a dream refuses to be caught."
HUUM!
The silk stopped falling.
Every strand in the tangled nest and for a great span around it halted in the air, and the golden dream-weather inside the little Gu flared, and inside Noah’s eyes decillions of dreams that were not his own began, faintly, to turn, because Sonder was awake and he was no longer the only dreamer he could reach!
The nine First Borns felt the place change, and for the first time the leader’s mouth was not a smile as she frowned.
And this insignificantly small region of THE Chrysalis of THE First Sundering filled with the concepts of Dreams faced a war of dreams!
The leader did not wait. Her crimson eyes flared. The white stag’s antlers blazed, every Observable Existence turning in its tines flaring with them.
"Voss. Kara. Take this fucker from both sides," she said. "The rest, close the surrounding existence. Leave him a mouth to talk with and nothing else."
The surroundings broke into motion, and the quiet nest of dreams became a killing floor!
The Descendant on the golden serpent came in from the left, and the one on the winged silver Steed dropped from above, and the space between them was where Noah stood, and it should have been the end of a small thing with no aura!
The serpent-rider’s palm opened, and from it poured white. THE Argent Loom! One of the oldest authorities in existence came off him in a woven flood, bright thin strands lashing out to bind an enemy and hold it still for the killing!
It closed on nothing.
Because Noah was no longer there to close on.
He had begun before the leader finished her order. He had learned today, at a terrible price, what became of a man who let stronger things set the tempo, and so he had not waited to be attacked. In the Infinity of a Dreamer’s stretched instant he had closed his eyes and dreamed one thing, whole and simple.
He dreamed he could not be found.
THE PRECEPT OF THE WAKING DREAM woke!
In the dream he had no aura, no weight, no place an eye could come to rest, and because he was the Human Dreamer and the dream was his own existence, it became true before the Loom could finish closing!
The white flood passed through empty silk.
|You dream yourself unseen. To perceivers below your Dreams, you are not there. The dream holds while it is not contested by a higher sight.|
The serpent-rider, Voss, drew his Loom back, confused, and the winged Steed’s rider landed in the space where the enemy had been and found nothing there to land on.
"Where did it go..." Voss started.
Noah was already under his mount.
He crossed the region unseen, past both riders still searching the air, and came up beneath the belly of the golden six-legged serpent.
He reached into it, a hand wrapped in blue and gold, and closed his fingers around one of the First Causes seated blazing in its organs, and he distilled it. He drew the essence sideways out of true, taking the taste and leaving the fruit, and the Cause guttered!
He was very proficient in Causes, after all.
The serpent screamed and buckled at one leg as a sunrise went dark inside it!
Voss felt his mount fail under him and could not see why. He hauled on the reins and wheeled, Loom spilling uselessly from his hand, eyes raking the silk. "Hey, this fucker is invisible even though his Dimensionality should not be higher than ours! Are they actually a Gu? They could be a rare Gu!"
"No way! Spread your immensity out and do not let anything near you!" The leader snapped.
It was good advice, but till not enough!
Because Noah had crossed to the next one. He slid a dreaming hand between two continent-plates of the great plated beast and gripped the Cause beneath and drew, and a plate went cold and grey and split.
He was gone up the side of the black stone quadruped before the beast finished stumbling, and he guttered the molten Cause running down its side, and it folded onto its own legs with a groan that shook the nebulas.
Three mounts crippled. Not one Descendant had seen him do it!
They were beings of immense weight and no sight past their own dreams!
And while he worked, he understood something.
He was asking himself how he should fight with his strongest points while ensuring no time for the Descendants to even unleash their true power.
And the pieces were clicking!
He was inside their perception. He was a dream moving through the place they lived. And a dream that could move through their perception could reach the thing at the center of it.
He had read their dreams already. The leader’s nod. Voss’s small ugly hunger. The plain-horse rider’s quiet wish that the hunts would end.
He had only read them.
What if he wrote?
Noah rose out of his crouch still unseen, and let a portion of his Provenance bloom, and reached, not for a Cause this time, but for the golden cloud of dream turning slow around the leader.
He controlled his Provenance like an extension of his existence to interfere with that cloud as why shouldn’t he be able to manipulate the dreams of others?!
And he began to dream her a different dream.
|You reach into the Existential Narrative of another existence through its dream. THE Mantle of THE Meta-Fictional Protagonist stirs.|
The leader went rigid on the white stag as her high Dimensionality felt something!
She felt something reach into the oldest quiet place in her, where her hopes and dreams lived, and she felt something changing!
She wheeled the stag around, crimson eyes wide, and for the first time there was something in her face that was not contempt.
Was this fucker actually a Gu?!
Her body illuminated with Dimensionality as her Intent filled with THE Argent Loom and an ancient Tongue erupted around her like a storm!
"Get the fuck out of my Existence!"
HUUM!
"You dream of recognized," Noah said, and his voice came from everywhere.
"From a Father who has never once looked at you. I have seen it."
He tightened his grip on the dream.
"That is a sad thing to be. Let me change it for you."
He began to write. Into the cloud of her he wrote a new past, one where the recognition had already come, long ago, and meant nothing, and she had felt nothing when it did!
He wrote it backward into the records of her, so that it had always been so!
And the leader’s existence lurched, because the dream that had shaped her every action was being told it had never been true, and at the edges, her records began to disagree with themselves!
She became furious when she felt this!
"Enough."
WUUa
She reached for something!
She drew a sword!
It came off her Existence in a wash of white and crimson, long and plain and terrible, and the instant it cleared the sheath the whole region of the Chrysalis changed its weight.
The silk stopped falling. The three bound Dream Gu on the ropes went rigid. And Noah, unseen in his dream, felt his imperceptibility strain for the first time, because the thing she had drawn was searching for him with a sight that was not eyes.
|WARNING.|
|The blade carries Existential Narrative not its own. Slivers of the Narrative of THE Sleepless Fiend are woven into its edge. It perceives across folds. Your unseen dream is no longer certainly unseen.|
The leader turned the blade, and its edge caught a light that came from nowhere in this place, and her lurching existence steadied itself on the weapon like a hand on a rail.
A sliver of brilliance of an Immense One flared as all of surrounding existence shuddered and cried!
She swung, at a pocket of empty silk, at nothing that anyone could see, and yet she still found her target as... it caught Noah full across the chest!